Here I found newspaper clippings and collector cards and Internet printouts, mostly to do with the space program, and a little leather pouch full of pennies dated the year 2000, and loose postage stamps, and fast-food stickers and button badges from TV-show promotions, and a tiny travel chess set on which I had taught my brother to play, late at night when we were supposed to be asleep. All of this junk had been handled and pored over endlessly. That little box was a screen grab of my mind aged ten or eleven, the stuff so small and worked over it was almost like scrimshaw. But it was also a little off-putting, grimy with the handling. I probably ought to have got out more, I thought.

I closed the box and put it back on its shelf. But as I did so I was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness. It hit me like a physical blow, a punch in the neck, and I had to sit down. It was just that the kid who had filled that box had gone as if he never existed, the whole rich complicated texture of his life unraveled. Life was so rich, but so transient: that was what made me sad.

But moping over this junk wasn’t filling any sandbags. I closed the cupboard, changed into a T-shirt and shorts, threw on some fresh sun cream and bug repellent, and headed down the stairs.

The porch with the swings was still intact, though it would benefit from some TLC. I walked across the backyard, where John’s kids were still playing. It used to be a lawn; now it was just a concrete slab. The kids gave me polite Happy smiles, and I waved back and walked on, with an armful of empty bags.

From the back gate the old gravel path led down toward the coast, as it always had. But before I got to the dunes I found myself walking across dykes and culverts and drainage ditches, and the rotting remains of many, many sandbags. I imagined my mother laboring here, determined, stubborn. But all her hydrological systems had failed, and when I looked back I could see the lines of sandbags retreating ever further up toward the house. You couldn’t drain away an ocean through a five-centimeter culvert.